My selected book this time around is Gray Mirror by Curtis Yarvin. It was provocative in all the right ways and places, and I enjoyed it very much. And by “provocative,” I don’t necessarily mean agreement, although there was plenty of that.
It is as though Yarvin were a very talented landscaper, and I admired his gardens very much. At the same time, I had trouble with his tectonic plates—his foundational presuppositions. The problem with nihilism is that gray too easily fades to black.
At the same time, his analysis of current power structures, and the games that elite democratic manipulators like to play—but enough about Fulton County—and regime decay, and radical alternatives, and so on, are frequently on the nose.
His historical revisionism and his arguments for monarchy are the sorts of positions that are capable of getting the chimps jumping, but he is quite different from the Internet bois who try to play that same kind of game. He is sensible, for starters, and if you looked up an outrageous quote of his and read on either side of it for five minutes, calm would quickly be restored. You come to understand that he does want a monarch, but one with less power than FDR had.
He reminds me of Nietzsche, one of the clearest philosophers I had ever read, so long as the subject was the foibles of the current smart set. But if the subject gets around to what the god balcony he is standing on might be bolted to, the answers become less and less adequate. That kind of gray will fade to black.
In the meantime, if you are interested in politics at the meta level, you really ought to read Yarvin. He is intelligent, sensible, and is willing to point out how obvious certain officially denied facts are.